Distributing protected logo images with Drupal projects

Yes, we have clear guidelines (see Drupal Git Repository Usage policy), which say:

All files checked into the repository (code and assets) must be licensed under GNU/GPL version 2 and later. (my emphasis)

(I presume these images are "files").

However, several people (including me) believe the current policy is unworkable and hurtful to Drupal, and we're trying to change it. For a discussion about a possible change, see, for instance #1856762: Revisit and Redefine Drupal's Policy on hosting 3rd party files and/or files that is not strictly GPL.

But until that change happens (which may take some time), the official policy is that images need to be under GPLv2+ to be allowed in a repo hosted on Drupal.org.

klausson wrote:

But I have a hard time believing that any company would release their trademark signage under GPL.

Of course not. That would allow the trademark to be altered, used for unrelated products, etc. Nobody is going to allow that.

As it happens, the current "everything must be GPL"-policy is also a problem for the Drupal core development team. The want to include the Drupal trademark with the core distribution for Drupal 8, but of course not under GPL. See: #605710: Decide on if and if so, how to implement the Drupal wordmark in core

klausson, here is what I know is being done:

The Drupal Association is setting up a Licensing Working Group (LWG). The draft charter for the group has been posted on g.d.o. in the "Legal" group: Licensing Working Group Charter.

As you can from the LWG's scope:

The LWG is responsible for the guidelines, policies, standards, tools, and processes around licensing of code and related assets hosted on Drupal.org, and to enforce these policies.

it will both be responsible for the maintaining guidelines and policies, and for enforcement of these.

If you want to get involved, the best place to start is probably to review the LWG charter, and comment if you think something in that charter need to be changed. The discussion about the LWG charter will stay open until November 1st.

When the LWG has been set up, I hope that one of its first priorities will be to review and propose a adjustment of the current "everything must be GPL"-policy, where the adjusted policy will permit non-GPL assets (i.e. images - including trademarks - icons and fonts), to be included in repos and distributions as long as the asset is included in mere aggregation (i.e. to be used verbatim in upstream works, not altered to create derivative works).

The LWG charter says:

Any proposed policy adjustments that affect a non-trivial number of contributors will be as widely publicized as possible and include a public "request for comment" period.

So if it wants to change this, the LWG must first formulate and propose an adjustment to the policy, and then listen to the community's response to such a proposal (the minimum period for community comments seem to be about four weeks, but if broad consensus is not reached in that period, it may take longer).

In other words, a realistic timeline for having the policy regarding images "adjusted" is that this will not happen before 2015.

Moving to LWG issue queue.

(We probably need to consolidate all those separate discussions about possible amendments to the licensing policy into a single thread.)

Changing title to make it clearer what that this issue is about protected logos, not image assets under some non-GPL libre license.

Postponed, pending decision about future policy regarding third party non-code assets.

One year has passed without any progress on this.

But of course Drupal developers put protected logos in their projects all the time. I had some time to kill today and did a quick checkup of the Project Application Review Queue. It took me about a short hour to spot these:

• https://www.drupal.org/node/2110259
• https://www.drupal.org/node/2176689
• https://www.drupal.org/node/2270915
• https://www.drupal.org/node/2654168

Just to make it clear: Having these logos in the project's repo is not legally possible as long as the entire repo is licensed under GPL. Since you don't own them, you can't license them. If you want to display protected logos, you have to tell your users to install them themself.

klausson, the solution to this very real problem is much simpler than you think.

We certainly don't need a new license. We don't need separate repo. All we need is a new git repo policy!

And the good news is that a new policy has already been proposed - you can see the proposal here:
http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/drupal-lwg/drupal-lwg.g...

There are also some working documents in Google Docs. This white paper explains how the LWG plan to deal with protected logos (in the sub-section titled "Proposed policy guidelines for non-code"): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rgGNqW_sybMt08QppWSCqa0q0WJIlIggmfFC...

Basically, the proposed new policy still requires all PHP committed to Drupal.org's git repository to be licensed as GPLv2+. But non-PHP files (e.g. fonts, icons, images, logos, videos, sounds and texts) do not carry this requirement. Under this new policy, you could be allowed to include a protected logo or trademark in your project's repo on Drupal.org (you can already legally do this if you host your project elsewhere, such as GitHub).

So what's the bad news? The bad news is that the LWG (of which I am a member) is not very good at making progress. AFAIK, there is no disagreement about the proposed policy among the LWG members - we just need to present it to the community and to make a call for discussion. I hope this can be done soon (there is nothing secret about the LWGs working documents, but obviously the announcement of the proposal must be done more "officially" and more organized than in a comment posted in a obscure thread with 6 followers on the LWG issue tracker).

Hi gisle,

Any third party materials you include must have their provenance, license and source documented in a file included in the project.

In this clause, can you explain what the difference is between provenance and source? I'm not clear on that.

Cheers, and thanks to everyone for working on this.

@Jeff Burnz,
good point, they're the same thing.

I've changed the sentence to to:

Any third party materials you include must have their ownership (if copyrighted), license/terms of use, and source documented.

Better?

Yep, that is clear to me now. Cheers.

The Drupal Git Repository Usage policy has changed. You now can include images received from 3rd parties in a module. For details about the policy, please see Policy on 3rd party assets on Drupal.org.

The issue summary simply ask if there is a policy. There now is, so I am closing this.

If you still want to request an exception for a specific trademarked logo, please open a new issue as outlined in Policy on 3rd party assets on Drupal.org.